Chuck Klosterman: belief

Transcript context

…Asking for scandal. The flow of betting on professional sports is much higher than the revenue of the sports themselves. There’s room for conflicting incentives. People selling inside information about player injuries. Referees not quite being deliberately dishonest, but just not always looking too hard at the fouls of one team, and so on. Relative to the flow of betting money, why should we have great faith in the process? I think that officiating is the issue where this does become a little dangerous and fragile. One thing that came out of the whole Tim Donaghy situation, when there was a scandal, the NBA did a pretty good job of sweeping it away, and everyone’s forgot about it. One of the things that came out of that was a realization that a referee can dictate the outcome of a game, simply by calling the game straight in the sense that they don’t have to create fouls or even try to look for situations where they can dictate the outcome. They can just occasionally call traveling, the way traveling actually is, or they can call lane violations on free throws which they normally completely ignore. It becomes almost this invisible way of manipulating the spread because they’re not doing anything. They’re not wrong about anything. They’re actually just being correct in a way that is usually forgotten. There is some risk with that. The fact of the matter is, pro athletes are now compensated to a degree where it would be difficult to convince them to throw a game or manipulate a spread with the risk that is there, with the amount of money they’re already making. There was a controversy about Len Dawson when he played for the Chiefs in Super Bowl IV. Before that Super Bowl, there was this idea that maybe he had some relationship with gamblers. The fact of the matter is, in the early 1970s, what a guy was making — you could definitely see how giving a guy $10,000 or whatever could be a legitimate amount of money. At the pro level now, the amount of money you’d have to pay these guys to make it worth the risk is huge. At college, harder to say. Here in Oregon now, I could gamble if I wanted to on the Oregon State Lottery, but you can’t gamble on college games. I suppose that they would see that that’s still an area of danger, that you could convince a . . . particularly since you can gamble on anything now. I think if somebody wanted to do this, what they would do is, they would probably get involved with the mid-majors in very small college teams, where it wouldn’t be that difficult, not only to get to a player but to give him something that would be worth his time. I think, though, that there was this fear that sports might become so splintered that it could recede from the culture, and they had to find a way to keep it as popular as it ever was. And gambling was the answer because gambling makes people who don’t care, care a lot. Why are so many people so interested in eSports? Have regular sports failed us? What’s going on there?…

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